If you haven't taken time to play with the new Expression line of tools provided by Microsoft, you should give them a try. I've been a pretty big fan of Macromedia's Dreamweaver for a few years - even though it has increasingly become more and more of a resource hog. But Microsoft's Expression Web is actually a full-on, viable, contender - which is HUGE, considering that it's a 1.0 release. Sure, it's got a couple of warts (all V1 software does), but I hands-down prefer it over Dreamweaver. Better yet, if you're an ASP.NET wonk, grab a trial of Expression Web today - as it will be the designer for Visual Studio Orcas. (Well, it would probably be more accurate to say that "Orcas" and Expression Web will be sharing a designer based on the same underlying core - I'm sure "Orcas" will heap on the additions/improvements.)
At any rate, Expression Web provides some really killer CSS functionality, and gives you a boat-load of options for managing styles, formatting, and so on. It REALLY does make the notion of using a designer/tool completely feasible when it comes to WYSWYG CSS - which is a major feat. They've also added some cool innovations in terms of dragging/resizing padding and margins, and so on.
How do I know all this? Well, I spent about a month actively working with the tool to create a Starter Kit for Expression Web. You can check it out on the Expression site at Microsoft.com - it's the Partner Portal Starter Kit. The idea for this starter kit was to take a 'CSS Zen Garden' approach to styling one ASP.NET page in a variety of different ways - using ONLY CSS.
NOTE: If you want to download the starter kit, make sure that you grab the password for the zip files on the download page.
You are an idiot for password protecting the starter kit. And the doc file will not uncompress becuase it has weird compression.
Why don't you test your delivery mechanisms?
Stop being an amatuer.
Posted by: Milton | February 02, 2008 at 03:51 PM
Milton, I will 100% agree with you on your comment. Password protecting that content was idiotic. Actually, it was beyond idiotic, it was moronic.
MS paid me a decent amount of $$ to create that starter kit as a way to show off how to use Expression Web with CSS and ASP.NET.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that _THEY_ had password protected the stuff I provided. I emailed them, but while the folks I worked with to create the content didn't like the fact that it was password protected, they weren't able to do anything with it.
So yeah, beyond lame.
Posted by: Michael K. Campbell | February 02, 2008 at 08:09 PM